The Call of Cthulhu

(Found Among the Papers of the Late

Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

by H. P. Lovecraft
ii
Chapter 1

The Horror in Clay

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a

survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . con-
sciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long
since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms
of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory
and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and
kinds . . . ”

— Algernon Blackwood

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have
hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not
masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the
single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and
maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of
truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—
in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I
hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I
shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the
professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that
he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

1
 My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death
of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic
Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor An-
gell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had
frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his
passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest
was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had
been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as
witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking Negro who
had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which
formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams
Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded
after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the
brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the
end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I
am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower,
I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that
purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston.
Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the Ameri-
can Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly
puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had
been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the
personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed
I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by
a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of
the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings
which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the
most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor
responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five
by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were
far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of
cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that
cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some
kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory,
despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed
in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest
affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial
intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its
nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster,
of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my some-
what extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus,

2
a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of
the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body
with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which
made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion
of a Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press
cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretense to lit-
erary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU
CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading
of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was divided into two sections, the
first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox,
7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspec-
tor John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A.A.S.
Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers
were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of differ-
ent persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines
(notably W. Scott Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest com-
ments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to
passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s
Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cut-
tings largely alluded to outré mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly
or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It
appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and
excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay
bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the
name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized him as the
youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had lat-
terly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and
living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was
a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from
childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he
was in the habit of relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”,
but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely
“queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually
from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes
from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its
conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculp-
tor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in
identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted
manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed
some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet im-
plied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder,

3
which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verba-
tim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole
conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He
said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities;
and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played
upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There
had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable
felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been
keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of
great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping
with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered
the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come
a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could
transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost
unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and dis-
turbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minute-
ness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the
youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes,
when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old
age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyph-
ics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place
to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange
cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises
of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership
in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult
or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future
reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the
manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related
startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some ter-
rible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or
intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscrib-
able save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those
rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.
On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and
inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure
sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He
had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and
had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium.
My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept
close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey,

4
whom he learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was
dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he
spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly
dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked
or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional
frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must
be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his
dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably
a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy. His temperature,
oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was
otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly
ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and
completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the
night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to
his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery,
and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless
and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of
the scattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact,
that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account
for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those
descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that
in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems,
had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst
nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking
for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions
for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have been var-
ied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any
ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original corre-
spondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really
significant digest. Average people in society and business—New England’s
traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely negative result,
though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear
here and there, always between March 23rd and April 2nd—the period of
young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though
four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange land-
scapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and
I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare
notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler
of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I contin-

5
ued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle
had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses
from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a
large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of
the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculp-
tor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes
and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of
the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible to-
ward the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very
sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy
and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure,
and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from
some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name
instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration
and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a
few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered
if all the objects of the professor’s questioning felt as puzzled as did this
fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, ma-
nia, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have
employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and
the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide
in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shock-
ing cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South
America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A
despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white
robes en masse for some “glorious fulfillment” which never arrives, whilst
items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end
of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report
ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes
bothersome at this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical
Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland, too, is full
of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot
hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926.
And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a
miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange paral-
lelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all
told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with
which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had
known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.

6
Chapter 2

The Tale of Inspector

Legrasse

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief
so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his
long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the
hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hi-
eroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only
as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is
small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when
the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis.
Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had
a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be
approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation
to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for
the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had
travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unob-
tainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and
he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of
his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette
whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that
Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary,
his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional consider-
ations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured
some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during
a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were
the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they
had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more
diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin,

7
apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured
members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the
police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful
symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his
offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the as-
sembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no
time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter
strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at
unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had ani-
mated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed
recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close
and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of
exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely an-
thropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of
feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore
feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct
with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated cor-
pulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with
undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of
the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the
doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quar-
ter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod
head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the
backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The
aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful
because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalcu-
lable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known
type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time.
Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy,
greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resem-
bled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the
base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation
of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of
even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material,
belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we
know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life
in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed de-
feat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who
suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writ-
ing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew.
This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropol-

8
ogy in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor
Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland
and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth;
and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singu-
lar tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of
devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsive-
ness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they
mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly
ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and
human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a
supreme elder devil or tornasuk ; and of this Professor Webb had taken a
careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the
sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime signif-
icance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they
danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor
stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and
some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in
all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled
members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral
ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought
the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst
the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison
of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and
scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish
rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the
Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their
kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed
at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among
his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told
them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse

related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers;
telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance.
It savoured of the wildest dreams of mythmaker and theosophist, and dis-
closed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes
and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.

9
 On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a
frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The
squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s
men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had
stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a
more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and
children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its inces-
sant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured.
There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and
dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could
stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had
set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At
the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in
silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly
roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now
and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by
its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and
every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement,
a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out
to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-
toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at
infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to
filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of forest night.
Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused
point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so
Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into
black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute,
substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends
of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless
white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-
winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight.
They said it had been there before d’Iberville, before La Salle, before the
Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It
was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and
so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on
the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough;
hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more
than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s
men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare
and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal
qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source

10
should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped
themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that
tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests
from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation would cease,
and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in
sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu
R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came
suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted,
and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the
orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an
acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and
twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a
Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were
braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire;
in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame,
stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which,
incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From
a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt
monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the
helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the
ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass
motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of
bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes
which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard an-
tiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper
within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D.
Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imagina-
tive. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings,
and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the
remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native super-
stition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief dura-
tion. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred
mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and
plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant
din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were
fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some
forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into
line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and
two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by

11
their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness,
the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and men-
tally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and
mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde
Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before
many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper
and older than Negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as
they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea
of their loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before
there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those
Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead
bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult
which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had
always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark
places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from
his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise
and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when
the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate
him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture
could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious
things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few.
But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old
Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or
not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing
now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not
the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant
only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and
the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the
ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged
Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the
haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever
be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely
aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports
and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the specula-
tions of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient
indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and
They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chi-
namen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands

12
in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but
there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round
again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come
themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether
of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image
prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were
right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when
the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer
lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their
great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious
resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for
Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate
Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented
Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the
dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all
that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted
thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of
chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among
them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach
the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small
idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark
stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret
priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and
resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind
would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good
and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing
and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new
ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth
would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult,
by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and
shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its
monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters,
full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had
cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high-priests
said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came
out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of
dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of
them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no
amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size
of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said

13
that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where
Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to
the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members.
No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said
that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the
much-discussed couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in

vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had
told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at
Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now
the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met
with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corrobo-
rated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence
of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal pub-
lications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to
face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the
image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him
and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly
a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young
Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not won-
der, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what
Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed
not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and
the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three
of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and
mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation
of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I sus-
pected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of
having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at
my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the pro-
fessor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind
and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought
the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript
again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the
cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor
and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a
learned and aged man.

14
 Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street,
a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture
which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the
ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in
America, I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the
specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic.
He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for
he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares
and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton
Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at
my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who
I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity
in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the
study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some
subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute
sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They
and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he
shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the
potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original
of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed
themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he
had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult,
save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made
clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly
have received the weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see
with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—
whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened
expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu
fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread rit-
ual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh,
and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure,
had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst
the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of
its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in
the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture
upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at
once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like, but
I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took
leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I
had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions.
I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time

15
raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mon-
grel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead
for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it
was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had writ-
ten, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real,
very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an
anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism,
as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity
the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor
Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my
uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up
from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless
push from a Negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine
pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to
learn of secret methods and rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is
true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things
is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the
sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died
because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much.
Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much
now.

16
Chapter 3

The Madness from the Sea

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the

results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-
paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the
course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal,
the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting
bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material
for my uncle’s research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the
“Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey;
the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one
day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room
of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers
spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned,
for my friend had wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the
picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with
that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item
in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What
it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest;
and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:

MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate
Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.

17
The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso,
arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in
tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert
of Dunedin, N.Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude
34◦ 210 , W. Longitude 152◦ 170 with one living and one dead man
aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was
driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy
storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was
sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon board-
ing to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one
man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The
living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown ori-
gin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at
Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in Col-
lege Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the sur-
vivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved
shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange
story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwe-
gian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-
masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao
February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma,
he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by
the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude
49◦ 510 W. Longitude 128◦ 340 , encountered the Alert, manned
by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes.
Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused;
whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and with-
out warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery
of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The
Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the
schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they
managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grap-
pling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced
to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of
their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy
mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First
Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second
Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going
ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their
ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised

18
 and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in
that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore,
though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story,
and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems,
he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage
her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that
time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he
does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died.
Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due
to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report
that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and
bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a
curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night
trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail
in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March
1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew
an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober
and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the
whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be
made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done
hitherto.

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a
train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the
Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on
land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as
they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on
which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen
was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out,
and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous
of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave
a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so
carefully noted by my uncle?
March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—
the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noi-
some crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the
other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange,
dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the
form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew of the Emma landed on
an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of
sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of
a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a
sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April
2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox

19
emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—
and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and
their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I
tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If
so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of
April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of
mankind’s soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my
host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was
in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange
cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum
was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about
one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming
and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that
Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and
inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in
West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring
experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty
officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and
members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in com-
mercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its
non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon
body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum
at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully
exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiq-
uity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s
smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous
puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought
with a shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Great Ones;
“They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I
now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reem-
barked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at
the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I dis-
covered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive
the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded
as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpi-
tant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front.
A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with
disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen
was no more.
He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in
1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public,

20
but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in
English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal.
During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle
of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar
sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach
him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid
it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave
me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow
that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to
entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read
it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s
effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful
voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and
redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the
water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped
my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the
city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of
the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of
those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the
sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them
on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone
city again to the sun and air.
Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty.
The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had
felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved
up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more
under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the
Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of
her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert
he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable
quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and
Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought
against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven
ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the
men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude
47◦ 90 , W. Longitude 126◦ 430 come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze,
and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible
substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh,
that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome
shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and
his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles
incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive

21
and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation
and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon
saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned
citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters.
When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost
wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic
majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed
without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe
at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height
of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal
statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert,
is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something
very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any
definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast
angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right
or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs.
I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had
told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place
he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres
and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same
thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous
Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could
have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted
when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked
perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily
elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after
the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before any-
thing more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have
fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly
that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear
away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the mono-
lith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked
curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon
bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt
that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around
it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slant-
wise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of
the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground
were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phan-

22
tasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Dono-
van felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as
he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that
is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and
the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then,
very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top;
and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled him-
self down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched
the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of
prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the
rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tene-
brousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the in-
ner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke
from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away
into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The
odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length
the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down
there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered
slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immen-
sity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison
city of madness.
Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of
the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure
fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no
language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch
contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked
or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect
went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant?
The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked
to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult
had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident.
After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for
delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned.
God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan,
Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging
frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen
swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have
been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So
only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the
Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and
hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

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 Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of
all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish
rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way.
Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began
to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore
that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered
like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than
the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to
pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back
and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death
found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could
surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desper-
ate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck
and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the
noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Nor-
wegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above
the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-
head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy
yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an
exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a
thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on
paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green
cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in
heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously
recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every
second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the
cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing
maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for
the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of
April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is
a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides
through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from
the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by
a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green,
bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court,
the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by
the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write
of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death
would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box
beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go

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this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together
that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon
all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and
the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not
think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I
shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has
shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more,
for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers
on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in
lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his
black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and
frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk
may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads
over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and
cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my
executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other
eye.

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